In a recent interview, Mike Wilson, global head of Logistics and Manufacturing at Panalpina, and newly chaired honorary visiting professor at Cardiff Business School, talked to professor Aris Syntetos, from the School’s Panalpina Research Centre, about manufacturing and supply chain trends, Sino-US trade conflicts and who will be the ultimate winners in global logistics.

How often have you taken your car to the garage for a simple repair only to have to wait days or weeks for a spare part to arrive? We have all experienced the frustration, but now the answer is easy: We can simply make the part when we need it. Well, it isn't quite so easy, hurdles remain, but today we're basically able to manufacture a product where and when we want it, thanks to the makerspace.

​Manufacturing products in Asia and shipping them across the globe is no longer sustainable – neither from a competitive nor an environmental perspective. In the new world of manufacturing, take-make-dispose supply chains are morphing into distributed, circular and sustainable supply chains. The drivers behind this development are product modularization, the makerspace movement, and 3D printing.

Could 3D printing herald a new era of lean supply chains? This is the title of a recently published article of the Lean Management Journal (LMJ) that highlights Panalpina’s ongoing research into the global supply chains of the future. The article's authors, Panalpina's Hrishikesh Pawar and Fevos Charalampidis, are convinced that the trend towards truly lean supply chains is about to accelerate.

Will the flow of information become more important than the flow of goods? Fact is, new modes of transport are not where the frontier of transportation lies. Digital transformation is. This blog post in two parts looks at five major trends that are shaping the freight forwarding and logistics industry – all of them linked to digital transformation.